When do you use "(internal quotation marks omitted)"?
You are quoting a court, and the sentence you want already quotes an earlier case, so it has quotation marks inside it. Do you keep those inner marks, drop them and add "(internal quotation marks omitted)," or reach for "(cleaned up)"?
If your court or journal has its own rule on this, reply with it below. That is exactly the kind of thing members should compare.
The team’s answer
Short answer. "(internal quotation marks omitted)" tells the reader that the words you quote had quotation marks of their own in your source and you took them out. It is accurate only if you actually removed marks, and it is useful only where your court or style guide accepts it. The safer default is to keep the inner marks, as single quotation marks, and name the earlier source with a (quoting ...) parenthetical.
The rules behind it
[Convention] Quotation marks alternate. Your quotation goes in double marks, and a quotation inside it switches to single marks.
[House style] By default, keep the inner marks and credit their author. Leave them out only if you add the omission note, only if the court you are writing for accepts that, and never to make an earlier court's words look like your source's. Court style manuals disagree here (some want the quoting parenthetical instead of the note), so check yours.
[House style] When you add notes about the words, put them right after the citation and before any (quoting ...) parenthetical.
One phrase, two Supreme Court opinions (each read in the official text)
The phrase "special justification," the standard for overruling precedent, has been passed from opinion to opinion.
1. Dickerson v. United States, 530 U.S. 428 (2000), kept every layer. On page 443 it quoted United States v. International Business Machines Corp. with the phrase in single marks, then listed the chain of earlier opinions in its parenthetical with "quoting" and "in turn quoting."
2. Halliburton Co. v. Erica P. John Fund, Inc., 573 U.S. 258 (2014), went the other way. On page 266 it put the two words in its own quotation marks, cited only Dickerson at page 443, and added "(internal quotation marks omitted)."
The note is what lets Halliburton skip the older opinions without misleading anyone.
In your own brief, quoting Halliburton, you have two honest options. Here they are as later citations, after both cases have been cited in full once:
Keep the marks: The Court requires "'special justification,' not just an argument that the precedent was wrongly decided." Halliburton, 573 U.S. at 266 (quoting Dickerson, 530 U.S. at 443).
Drop them and say so: The Court requires "special justification, not just an argument that the precedent was wrongly decided." Halliburton, 573 U.S. at 266 (internal quotation marks omitted).
The second version is shorter but tells the reader less: nothing in it says the two words came from Dickerson.
What the note does not cover
Your own edits. If you insert, alter or cut words, you still mark them with brackets and ellipses.
Citations or footnote numbers you dropped. That is a separate note, such as "(citation omitted)."
A passage that had no inner quotation marks. Then there is nothing to omit, and the note is simply wrong.
What about (cleaned up)? It is a newer, broader parenthetical that also covers inherited brackets, ellipses and citations. [Unresolved] Courts do not treat it uniformly, so check what your court accepts before you use it.
Read more
The Quotations chapter (its opening is free to read): https://citationcode.com/book/quotations (opens in a new tab)
Flag a case citation that follows a quotation but gives no pinpoint (subscribers can also have the opinion searched for the quoted words): https://citationcode.com/checker (opens in a new tab)
The two opinions in the official U.S. Reports: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USREPORTS-530/pdf/USREPORTS-530-428.pdf (opens in a new tab)
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USREPORTS-573/pdf/USREPORTS-573-258.pdf (opens in a new tab)